Any Questions ?

I am a little in love with George Saunders. 

George - am I allowed to call him George? - is a writer whose stories I’ve adored for years, but as of late it’s his words on writing that are filling me with joy and eliciting fervent exclamations of ‘Yes!’ as I listen on headphones to podcasts while out walking my dog - apologies to anyone alarmed as they pass by. He’s just come out with a book called A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, in which he explores the craft of writing via the example of four Russian masters in short stories: Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev and Gogol. Before you feel intimidated and decide this is not for you, what you also get in this book is a glimpse into George Saunders’ classroom - he teaches creative writing at Syracuse University - and what a great place this is for any writer to be. Believe me. 

Or if you don’t, look him up and listen to/read some of his interviews online. You’ll get a sense of what a gentle, funny, humble, right-on-the-money teacher he is. (Those lucky lucky students at Syracuse.)

What I want to talk about in this post has been inspired by the following passage from A Swim in a Pond in the Rain:

‘When we talk about fiction, we tend to use terms like “theme”, “plot”, “character development”, and “structure”. I’ve never, as a writer, found these very useful. (“Your theme’s no good” gives me nothing to work with, and neither does “You might want to make your plot better”.) These terms are placeholders, and if they intimidate us and block us up, as they tend to do, we might want to put them aside and try to find a more useful way to think about whatever it is they’re placeholding for.’

Instead, citing the Chekhov story he is currently exploring page by page, George suggests, 

‘We might think of structure as simply: an organizational scheme that allows the story to answer a question it has caused its reader to ask.’

I’ll say it again…(this phrase sung in my head by John Lennon, in his song God). 

‘…an organisational scheme that allows the story to answer a question it has caused its reader to ask.’

For me this is almost everything that needs to be said about Story work. 

Or, if there is a lot more one can say, in order to be helpful, all of it – every different system or template of structure, five-act, three-act – is seeking the very same result: to help a writer get to the place where their story ‘answers the questions it had caused a reader to ask’. 

And this is 95% of what my job entails when someone sends me their work. To be a reader who asks questions. Specific story questions, based on what I’ve read. Questions that have nothing to do with any pre-knowledge I have of story theory or existing plot structures - that might come later, when I’m writing out my feedback, if I think it might be helpful. But the strongest way I can be helpful is to be an innocent, eager reader, and ask the questions a child might. Why did he do that? Isn’t he going to chase after her? How come she didn’t tell the truth? How did she get here? Does she love him? (Because it feels as if she doesn’t.)

One of the most common problems that comes up in manuscripts I receive is that writers forget a question they’ve made the reader ask, and never answer it. Instead they answer some other question…and the readers are left feeling confused or vaguely dissatisfied, and not sure why. This is surprisingly easy to do, especially in the long form of a novel. After all, it usually takes at least a few months to write a first draft of a novel - more like a year, for most of us - and during that time a lot changes. We change our mind about what it is we want to say, the characters change, we get new ideas, about them, about the story. All very normal, and all very healthy. NEVER let obsessing about structure curtail your imagination’s freedom in a first draft.

But once you’ve reached the end - the first end - that’s when you need to start looking hard at all the weirdness that’s emerged from you, at the brand new world you’ve created from nothing. And ask yourself as you go over the manuscript, chapter by chapter, page by page: what questions have I created for my readers? How and when did I answer them?

Some writers are very good at doing this themselves, at stepping outside of their own stories and forgetting what they already know. But most of us need readers, at some point in this process. Readers to ask the questions that didn’t get answered. To tell us what they thought the question was…but somehow that question was never answered, it just seemed to disappear and so they sort of lost their way in what we were wanting them to understand and also why they bothered if they were never going to get their questions answered in the first place.

For a reader there’s nothing more pleasurable than the sensation of information arriving at just the right moment. We wonder about something and…sooner or later, sometimes the very next paragraph, sometimes when we are most aching for resolution…there it is: the answer.

This is the writer we all want to be, the writer who gives this satisfaction.

So go and find readers whom you trust, who can help you answer the right questions.